TL;DR: Why are cartoons today so cheap? Just look at Foster's home for imaginary friends, the Power Puff Girls and Chowder, and compare them to the original Scooby Doo, The land before time, and The Flintstones. These new things are nothing but cheap vector graphics, mass produced and rendered in half an hour, relying on funny voices and semi-curse words, funny noises and 10c-a-dozen one-liners for humour. What ever happened with the quality you could find in cartoons ten years ago? If I was a kid (well, a younger kid), and knew about those good old series, I'd boycott the new stuff. If it isn't cheap vector graphics, it's animé, and if it isn't animé, it's cheap 3D graphics.
A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon an old copy of one of my favourite childhood cartoon movies, Balto. Not having anything else to do, and feeling a little nostalgic about the dusty, black cassette of times past, I hooked up my old VCR and 20" CRT TV. It was a nice watch, and I still like the movie now, ten years later, just as much as I did when I was six. It has some wit, looks nice, has an ok story and characters you can attach to. It is one of those older, all-cartoon films from just before the era of computer animation being more economical (not to mention advanced enough) than doing it by hand, giving it that nice feeling of knowing that some guys over at Universal Studios spent a couple of minutes drawing each frame.
Out of curiosity, I checked the Wikipedia page for the movie, and, to my surprise, there had been two sequels made in 2002 and 2005. I thought I might as well catch up on the franchise, as I like watching those kinds of movies before I go to bed, gets my mind off things. A quick search left me with a digitally acquired copy of each of the sequels.
Being based on a true story, it's hard to make decent sequels to the original Balto. I was a bit sceptical when I pressed play and got greeted by some vector-based crow flying around my screen. Things changed after maybe 15 minutes, and overall it was a quite nice movie, better than I had originally expected.
But here's where it gets nasty.
Tonight, I was gonna watch the last of them. I didn't. The moment I clicked play, I got greeted by poorly rendered figures, some water that looked like something from Half-Life 1, and some landscapes with 2D trees sticking out of them. I was about to close VLC by then, but I thought I'd give it a chance. Maybe it'll turn. I was wrong. After another couple of minutes, a bombardment of funny noises, funny voices, vector graphics and one-liners came raining down on my head. I then closed VLC. Way to kill off a merchandise.
I miss the 90's. Entertainment was actually entertaining back then, and family films truly were family films, and not some screaming, jumping, spazzing, farting 150FPS blobs rushing about, that only the kids have the energy to listen to and follow.
A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon an old copy of one of my favourite childhood cartoon movies, Balto. Not having anything else to do, and feeling a little nostalgic about the dusty, black cassette of times past, I hooked up my old VCR and 20" CRT TV. It was a nice watch, and I still like the movie now, ten years later, just as much as I did when I was six. It has some wit, looks nice, has an ok story and characters you can attach to. It is one of those older, all-cartoon films from just before the era of computer animation being more economical (not to mention advanced enough) than doing it by hand, giving it that nice feeling of knowing that some guys over at Universal Studios spent a couple of minutes drawing each frame.
Out of curiosity, I checked the Wikipedia page for the movie, and, to my surprise, there had been two sequels made in 2002 and 2005. I thought I might as well catch up on the franchise, as I like watching those kinds of movies before I go to bed, gets my mind off things. A quick search left me with a digitally acquired copy of each of the sequels.
Being based on a true story, it's hard to make decent sequels to the original Balto. I was a bit sceptical when I pressed play and got greeted by some vector-based crow flying around my screen. Things changed after maybe 15 minutes, and overall it was a quite nice movie, better than I had originally expected.
But here's where it gets nasty.
Tonight, I was gonna watch the last of them. I didn't. The moment I clicked play, I got greeted by poorly rendered figures, some water that looked like something from Half-Life 1, and some landscapes with 2D trees sticking out of them. I was about to close VLC by then, but I thought I'd give it a chance. Maybe it'll turn. I was wrong. After another couple of minutes, a bombardment of funny noises, funny voices, vector graphics and one-liners came raining down on my head. I then closed VLC. Way to kill off a merchandise.
I miss the 90's. Entertainment was actually entertaining back then, and family films truly were family films, and not some screaming, jumping, spazzing, farting 150FPS blobs rushing about, that only the kids have the energy to listen to and follow.
The idea of any hi-fi system is to reproduce the source material as faithfully as possible, and to deliberately add distortion to everything you hear (due to amplifier deficiencies) because it sounds 'nice' is simply not high fidelity. If that is what you want to hear then there is no problem with that, but by adding so much additional material (by way of harmonics and intermodulation) you have a tailored sound system, not a hi-fi. - Rod Elliot, ESP
